I have been having a conversation with Graham Attwell - the driving force behind the concept of the personal learning environment (PLE) - on how mobile devices will impact the PLE. Channel agnosticism is a big part of our ‘Learning on Your Terms’ philosophy, or in other words the student should always have the choice on how they access networked content, be it through a desktop browser, laptop browser, mobile phone, networked TV (e.g. Apple TV), etc. The technology is just ‘plumbing’ and should focus on facilitating study access to learning tools.
Beyond this ‘plumbing’ though, increased network access will put increasing importance, on not only personal contextual variables, but also environmental contextual variables.
There is an insightful report from 2006 entitled ‘Ambient Learning - Ambient, multimodal and context-sensitive lifelong learning (PDF link)‘ that explicitly lays out what these variables could be.
To date, personalization in modern web design has very much focused on the personal contextual variables, be they socio-demographic, marketing mix-related criteria, medical context, or business context.
But by bringing the network into the context of people’s lives through mobile technologies, a whole set of environment contextual variables are going to be thrown into the mix: local context, time context, physical context and infrastructure context.
It seems clear to me that there will be a trend in the design of web-based learning toolkits, to not only incorporate traditional variables for personalization, but also leverage these new environment variables enabled by the ‘plumbing’ of increasingly powerful mobile devices.
